The Boys of Delta Lambda Phi; Hazing Is Out. Frat Brothers Figure Gay Pledges
Have Been Through Enough
By Lisa Leff
Washington Post Staff Writer
There once was a mighty Lambda man
Who lived by the sword;
Defending the kingdom's honor,
He crushed the rogue horde,
With a whirl of steel he took the fight
And won the prince's heart that night.
-From the official toasting song of Delta Lambda Phi
The brothers of Delta Lambda Phi are awfully pleased with themselves. They
have dispatched 15 of their pledges into the Friday night frenzy of Dupont
Circle for their first post-initiation event, a semi-raunchy scavenger hunt. A
used condom, a jar of peanut butter with the imprint of a woman's breast, a
Partridge Family album and a cute boy not yet of drinking age are among the
items the group was charged with finding.
Now it is 2 a.m., and the weary pledges are at the fraternity's de facto
chapter house, a Second Street NE apartment where the pledge master, a
Midwesterner named Jeff, and two other brothers live. Seated ceremoniously
beside a row of wooden paddles bearing the frat's Greek letters, Jeff chastises
the young men kneeling before him for failing to secure the first object on the
list, a black velvet painting of Elvis.
"At midnight, velvet Elvis art is very difficult to get. Washington isn't
kitschy enough," protests an extroverted pledge named Sean Welker.
On the next items, the recruits do better. They come through with a stolen
trophy ("We just seduced a jock," Welker explains) and three lipstick-kissed
napkins from Camelot, a downtown strip joint. On one napkin, a dancer has
written "I almost changed his ways." By the time they pull out a picture of two
pledges smooching sweetly by a Union Station fountain, the brothers are
squealing with delight.
"We were really worried going into Camelot," confesses Darrin Ford, a
22-year-old blond who moved here from California seven months ago. "We thought
we would get beat up." His deadpan voice cuts the laughter in half. The threat
was real. It is one reason the Lambda men are in this room.
A Greek-letter fraternity for gay men? It is hard to imagine a minority
group more foreign to frats, those testosterone-and-beer-soaked sanctuaries of
American Guydom. Why would gays embrace the rituals and symbols of institutions
that typically do not welcome them as members, anyway?
To its loyal brotherhood, Delta Lambda Phi, which was born in Washington
seven years ago and has spawned 30 chapters across the country, makes all the
sense in the world. On its simplest level, the fraternity provides a safe and
stable social outlet for men, most of them in their twenties, who are put off by
the sexually charged atmosphere of gay bars and the relentlessly sober agendas
of many gay support and political groups. Many of its members had only recently
acknowledged their homosexuality to themselves, never mind their families, when
they joined.
"I didn't have any gay friends, let alone any close gay friends. The idea of
plunging into the gay community was very intimidating," said Chris Hunt, 27, a
University of Maryland graduate student who is president of the D.C., or Alpha,
chapter, which includes current and former students in the region.
Hunt, the son of a Kentucky coal miner and an X-ray technician, had been out
of the closet for one month when he attended his first Delta Lambda Phi meeting
at College Park three years ago. He vividly remembers peering into a Student
Union meeting room and seeing an innocuous-looking bunch of guys "drinking soda
and eating cookies." It took five tries before he summoned the courage to join
them.
"If that took all that nerve, imagine trying to walk into a bar by yourself,
walking into Lambda Rising (bookstore) by yourself or picking up a copy of the
Blade by yourself," he said.
The decidedly unswishy image the fraternity projects was partly why Chris
Norton, 22, a Georgetown University graduate who works at a public policy think
tank on Capitol Hill, joined last year.
"I had all these negative impressions of what the gay community would be
like. When I went to clubs, I expected to see guys walking around in feather
boas," Norton said. When he attended his first Lambda party two years ago at
Trumpets, a gay bar on 17th Street NW, he saw something else.
"I was shocked. I knew so many people from Georgetown. People were wearing
sweat shirts and baseball caps. They were just guys. For the first time I felt
there were other gay people like me," Norton said.
A sense of belonging also drew Welker, 20, to the fraternity. An enlisted
soldier from Illinois stationed at Fort McNair, Welker is in the process of
leaving the military. A female friend "outed" him this summer, he said. While
Welker could fight for his job given the Pentagon's new policy on gays in the
military, Welker said he has had enough of "living a lie."
"My superior took me in his office and said, `I heard you are a fairy, are
you?' I said, `No, I'm a gay man.' "
Welker said that while he was initially skeptical about being part of the
Greek system, which he had always associated with "a bunch of little boys trying
to prove their manhood," Delta Lambda Phi has helped prepare him for an openly
gay, civilian life.
"It's about celebrating the fact that you like to have a good time," he
said. "I can continue living (in) the safety of the straight world, or I can
celebrate who I am in a world that celebrates it."
Yet as much as the Lambdas cling to their "boys just wanna have fun" image,
given the obstacles to acceptance gays still face, they can never completely
escape the serious side of their mission. One 22-year-old member believes that
fate led him to see a poster Hunt put up on the Georgetown campus in 1992, two
weeks after he officially came out. The poster stayed up only about an hour
before someone tore it down, he said.
"I was just having a really hard time. I was practically suicidal," said the
member, who requested anonymity because his family does not know he is gay.
What Delta Lambda Phi gives him, he said, is an anchor and unconditional
acceptance.
"I thank God every day I found a group that is loving and caring. I never
imagined I would be this comfortable with my life," he said. "There are gay
clubs, but they are not families. There are even support groups. But support
groups aren't families."
In the Beginning
Delta Lambda Phi was the creation of Vernon Strickland, a thirtysomething
lawyer. In 1986, while he was studying law at George Washington University,
Strickland and some older friends bemoaned what they felt was the monotony of
Washington's gay social scene. Strickland idly remarked that the gay community
could benefit from something along the lines of Delta Epsilon, the fraternity he
had pledged at the University of Florida. His friends loved the idea and agreed
to finance it.
"To me, a fraternity can be a tremendous growth experience, especially for a
young man who is away from home for the first time. I thought how sad it was
that gay men had never had equal access to that social institution when I had
such a great deal of respect for it," Strickland said.
That fall, Strickland devoted himself to building a fraternity from the
floor up. Approaching the task as an intellectual challenge, he immersed himself
in the history of fraternities in America, taking comfort that both Jews and
blacks successfully founded their own frats when they found themselves frozen
out of the mainstream.
While he prefers to keep the way he named the fraternity a secret, he
acknowledges that he centered it on Lambda, the 11th letter of the Greek
alphabet and a well-known symbol of gay pride. He selected a centaur as the
fraternity symbol, wrote the initiation ritual and advertised a winter rush.
In the spring, with himself the only brother and his backers no longer
interested in the project, Strickland inducted his first class of 26 pledges. He
spent the next 18 months visiting college campuses to establish other chapters,
including ones at UCLA and Boise State University in Idaho. While the number of
chapters fluctuates as founding members graduate or move away, 15 are active
now. Each summer, the fraternity holds a national convention.
The local chapter of 57 active members includes current and former students
from Georgetown, George Mason, American and George Washington universities, as
well as the University of Maryland. None of the area's college campuses has
enough interest to sustain its own chapter, although there has been talk of
starting one at Gallaudet, the national university for the deaf.
The group has a lot in common with typical straight fraternities. It boasts
all the basic trappings of Greek life - a rush, selective bidding and secret
initiation rituals. It has an official song, an official cheer, big brothers and
an official crest. Pledges are required to perform community service and often
work on behalf of nonprofits with ties to the gay community, such as the
Whitman-Walker Clinic. The chapter is raising money to award a college
scholarship to a gay or bisexual high school student.
"It was a question whether you could take a traditionally macho institution
and imbue it with progressive-type notions and a little bit of gay history,"
said Strickland. "Frankly, I'm amazed that it grew the way it did."
Men of Distinction
For all its similarities with straight fraternities, Delta Lambda Phi is
different in several key respects. Hazing is forbidden, for example. In fact,
the big brothers avoid doing anything that could be construed as degrading to
their pledges. During the six-week pledge period, the new members take tests on
the fraternity's history, memorize the Greek alphabet and throw a party for the
older brothers. Physical contact is limited to hugs.
"As gay men, we are hazed by society, so there is no point in doing it to
each other," said Wade Price, 23, a Maryland graduate who also lives in the
unofficial frat house.
Price, who said he was always curious about the straight fraternities at
College Park, uses the word "hazing" quite deliberately. Pledges and gays both
endure verbal threats, beatings and humiliation, he said. The only difference is
that pledges consent to their treatment.
"You don't even have to have personally experienced society's hatred toward
gays. Hearing about it, you always have to be afraid of it, and that in itself
is a form of hazing," Price said.
It is also safe to say that the Lambdas belong to the only fraternity in
the nation that has to consider whether to ban romantic relationships between
pledges and brothers. Although love affairs between members are more the
exception than the rule, they happen. When they do, the parties involved are
usually "talked to" and reminded that if the relationship goes sour, they will
be expected to treat an old lover like any other brother.
Despite efforts to tailor their traditions to a gay audience, the
fraternity has been criticized at times for being too Greek. The practice of
having the brothers handpick pledges instead of accepting anyone who wants to
join has particularly offended some people, Hunt said. And when a group of men
tried to start a chapter at the University of California-Berkeley three years
ago, their most vocal opposition came not from the established Greek community,
but from their homosexual classmates, who regarded the Greek system as
inherently anti-gay.
In their defense, the Lambdas say their membership tends to be more diverse
than in most frats. The current 16-member pledge class here was chosen from a
field of 62 aspirants and includes three black men, a Japanese American and an
Indian American - demographics that mirror those of the fraternity as a whole.
You don't even have to be gay to belong, although there are not any straight
members now.
"We have been accused of only picking the cutest guys, which hasn't been
true," said Price. "I've never heard anyone in the discussion of who to choose
bring up a prospective pledge's appearance."
As an example of the fraternity's open-minded attitude, the brothers
point to their 26-year-old pledge master, whom they half-jokingly refer to as
their token reactionary. Jeff, a conservative, boat-shoe-and-loafer Republican
who did not want his last name to appear in print, works as a lobbyist and
believes the U.S. military has every right to keep men like him out of its
ranks.
Jeff says he "majored in fraternity" as a closeted undergrad. Out of loyalty
to his old, straight chapter, he refuses to name the fraternity. He concedes,
however, that his brothers probably would have kicked him out if they knew he
would one day bring another man as his date to Delta Lambda Phi's Founder's Day
formal.
The Brother Bond
The latest group of pledges, the Mu class of Delta Lambda Phi's Alpha
chapter, meets weekly at George Washington University's Marvin Center to learn
the fraternity heritage. On one recent night, Jeff puts them through the paces
while Price and some of the brothers lean cockily against the walls, gossiping
about their latest love interests.
Jeff reminds his charges that they must collect the signatures of all the
brothers into their pledge books, which he urges them to personalize with
photographs and mementos of their initiation experience.
It does not take long to realize that Jeff and the other brothers do not see
this ritualized rite of passage as a campy spoof. Indeed, they wear their Greek
letters with the same pride as, say, the brothers of Sigma Chi. Maybe more.
Because for all the Greek system's connotations of mindless drinking and
destruction, they find in the model something noble - namely, the ideal of
platonic friendships with the capacity to last a lifetime.
"In a fraternity you experience a bond with your brothers that almost
transcends words, and it's something that is very important to all of us," Hunt
said. "It may sound funny, but all the traditions and mystique build upon that."
At its core, that is what Delta Lambda Phi is about. It is the lesson the
brothers try to impart to the pledges as they practice the fraternity cheer. The
first three lines go like this: "Lambda Men, one time. Lambda Men, two times.
Lambda Men all the damn time." They are supposed to punctuate the end of each
line with a loud, belly-deep "Ho!"
Hearing their dissonant chanting, Jeff is not impressed. "It should be like
someone punched you in the stomach. Ho!" he demonstrates.
"I don't know what that's like," whines Terry Skoda, a pledge who is 19 but
who looks more like Dennis the Menace with his blond hair, hairless cheeks and
striped T-shirt.
Jeff shakes his head in mock disgust. He leads them again from the top until
they get it right, their voices lowered to deep, staccato bellows:
"Brothers embracing fellow brothers, strong the circle we. Lambda Men, Lambda
Men, the best fraternity!"
Copyright 1993 The Washington Post